Ganymede arched an eyebrow. “You’ll put a humanitarian veto on the trial?”
“I’ll get one of my charities to. Everyone expects Cousins to do that sort of thing, it’ll seem natural. I’ll tell the public how Mycroft Canner is a poor, sad trauma victim, and all this is the tragic lashing out of a bash’orphan who needed help. From me they’ll accept it. I can even make them feel good about themselves for being so forgiving, but I want all of you to remember that I’m against this. When a dear, beloved, wonderful pet dog starts killing people, you put it down. If you don’t, more people die.”
The husk of Felix Faust’s body was, even back then, barely strong enough to sigh. “I appreciate the thought, my dear, but it won’t work.”
She scowled. “You think I can’t control my own Hive?”
He smiled, but one can always feel the scientist behind the man reading numbers instead of faces, and judging by Brill’s criteria, as arcane as craniometry or horoscope. “It’s not that, Bryar, it’s just that you’re a bad liar, and you need at least another two weeks to recover from Leigh’s death enough to talk about this in public.”
“You think I can’t—”
“Make a speech,” he challenged. “Make a speech for us right now about how Mycroft Canner is a poor puppy who got kicked once too often. If you can orate on the subject for two minutes without crying, then I’ll believe that you can get us out of this.”
Rage swelled in Kosala’s face, but turned at once to tears.
The Anonymous pressed her to him. “I think Felix is right. You’re proposing that you lie to your own Hive about your opinions. It’s a brave offer, but do you really want to live with that? I don’t think any of us could do it, and I don’t want to ask it of you.”
“Quite right.” The unknown Lady spoke up now—‘Madame’ they had called her? She seemed all smiles and good sense beneath the mask of makeup which made her seem as otherworldly as a china doll. Are you surprised, reader, that she stayed quiet so long? What cares she what happens to this little murderer when the fact that only her salon can solve the crisis is a victory itself? “We’ll find another way to persuade the populace, one that doesn’t put all the strain on one person, or endanger reelection, or precedent, or the law.” She glanced from Power to Power as she listed each one’s concern. “I have all the resources we could want here, and no one expects this decision to be quick. We’ll take our time and sort it out as friends. That is what my salon is for.”
She looked straight at me during the last sentence, exposition for the outsider’s benefit, to make sure I understood her, what she was, her place among the Powers. Doubt burned through me. What I had done I did in the confidence that I knew how the world worked, how it would react, how the Hives and strats and laws and numbers ebb and flow, as Geneva, Aeneas, and Deputy Censor Kohaku taught me to predict. Now, just as Eureka Weeksbooth would thirteen years later, I found a snarl in my web. I felt like an old astronomer, who had spent a lifetime plotting the courses of a flock of distant stars, only to discover on my deathbed that there was a great black something out there pulling all astray—what doom did this spell for the rocket I had launched, loaded with hopes and false calculations? Curiosity is a dangerous thing for a dead man; it tempts one to want to live.
That moment was when I saw the Child. I do not know how long He had been there, standing close beside my cage, a volume of Cicero forgotten in His hands as His studies found a new object. He wore a tiny mourning suit, fresh from the tailors, period and perfect, trimmed with a Porphyrogene’s imperial purple, since at eight years old He had not yet discovered that the adults would accomodate if He voiced His preference for pure black. His eyes reminded me of the late King Isabel Carlos the First, whom Makenna Mardi had brought me to meet upon his royal deathbed at the venerable age of one hundred and forty-nine. There had been something unfair in the old king’s eyes, a hunger to snatch this world back from the foolish children who had inherited it. I remember shuddering, thinking my generation would have stood helpless against his political guile, honed over a century and a half, that only death relieved us of the necessity of parricide. And now those terrifying eyes seemed to stare at me once more, from a Child’s face.
Seeing me spot Him, Bryar Kosala called to the Child. “Jed, honey, come away from there. It’s not good for you.”
I shuddered in my bonds of Cannergel (Utopia later named it for me). You had a birth bash’, reader. You know the special way your ba’pas gazed on you, grave and loving, parents even if it was not their blood coursing through your veins. The Powers all looked at Him that way now, the King, Director, Headmaster, Anonymous, even Bryar who is everybody’s Mom was His Mom more. There is no glue like a child to keep a quarreling couple from cutting the knot, so what of quarreling empires?
Madame called now, since the Child did not move. “Jehovah, mon Petit, viens ici.” She made room for Him on the couch between the Emperor and herself.
Still the Child lingered, staring, thinking, crafting His words. For me. “You disappoint me, Master Canner. I thought to see the Liberated Man, but you still hid behind a cause.”
This was the death of what was Mycroft Canner. It was impossible. The Child saw in an instant the hypocrisy that I had not quite admitted even to myself. He was right. I was never strong enough to do evil for the sake of evil. Saladin was the true, free beast. I had merely followed, leaning half on him, half on the crutch of a hidden good that lay beyond the Mardis’ deaths. The Child saw, as if my inmost self were an open book before Him. He was monstrous, with powers humans should not have, and here the Seven leaders of the Earth were doting on Him as on a Son. Panic is too weak a word. Metamorphosis, perhaps? An ant which strays onto someone’s clothes, and is spirited in a car to an alien land incomprehensibly far from home and colony, could not feel more lost. All my strength had stemmed from the conviction that I could read the shape of the future as it unrolled interminably from the present. That present had been a lie, the rivalries, the enmity between Mason and Mitsubishi, the competition among Hives, all lies. Was I wrong, then? Had they not had to die, Luther, Geneva, Kohaku, Laurel, Seine? Apollo? I suffered many injuries during my capture, but only this wound bled.
Spain took the Child by the hand, His small fingers locking around the royal thumb with the speed of habit.
It does not matter what I screamed at that moment, for, through the cage, no one could hear me. I realized who the Boy must be. Everyone knew the Emperor had an adopted Son, but the young Porphyrogene glimpsed in heartwarming shots in newspapers had no more factored in my calculations than the child of any Senator.
“Fili,” Caesar addressed the Boy as He settled on the couch beside him, “what do you think we should do with Mycroft Canner?”
The Child Jehovah looked again at me, and through the glass my eyes begged Him to read me again, to tell the others how deeply He had struck me, how desperately I wished to see more of this new world which proved the old a lie.
“He is benign, Pater. Make him a Servicer.”
“Benign?” Bryar Kosala knelt before the Child, her skirts and Madame’s cocooning Him with silk. “No, sweetheart, that’s a very dangerous criminal who’s done terrible things.”
Even in those days His shell did not move to look at things, only His eyes. “Benign means something which can do no harm.”